Working as a child and adolescent psychotherapist I have to foster emotional understanding and skills every day - most important to me are P. Fonagy's ideas on mentalization. To my opinion, literature helps to look "into" another person's mind (that means to mentalize) - and this "looking into feelings and thoughts" is necessary to create a hypothesis on what our fellows think and feel in every day life and to understand ourselves better. I believe that literature can help to follow another`s mind in a way which is unique - as we cannot look into the thoughts of others other than by literature.

Teaching students (or clients in a therapeutic relationship) to mentalise is very important. But you can go much further. When you work with imaginary stories (literature), you can teach students to identify the emotions experienced by fictional characters. By spelling out the emotions of fictional characters, students learn to overcome their deeply engrained suspicion of emotions. Most societies bring up their children in an environment of alexithymia (the inability to recognise and talk about emotional experience). Analysing the emotions of fictional characters is a bit like role-playing, which helps students to recognise what other people feel. In a second step, they also learn to recognise and label their own emotions.

This takes me into the field of Affect Labelling, another topic which fascinates me.

Last term, I taught a literature class to a group of twenty university students. We started the term with Tim Gillespie’s article “Why Literature Matters” The key concept Gillespie introduces in the article is what he calls “empathetic imagination.” Basically, it means “the cultivation of a deeper form of imagination, the empathetic identification with other humans, often people quite unlike ourselves.” Gillespie’s article and his concept of empathetic imagination were our constant points of reference throughout the term. We read all the texts (short stories, plays and poems) in this light. Just like yours, my students reported that the texts we covered in class somehow changed the way they looked at others (family members, friends and refugees) in everyday life. For instance, just after we finished analysing Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, an elderly student (she was in her mid-fifties, I assume) said that she recommended her daughter to read the play, and it helped strengthen the bond between them. On several occasions, other students started to tell me about the positive effects of reading and analysing literary texts on their relationships. So, I do believe that one of the main functions/objectives of literature courses should be teaching emotional intelligence, or what Gillespie aptly calls “empathetic imagination.”

The term "empathetic imagination" opens up new ways of understanding what is happening in our minds. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the imagination as a faculty that enables us to connect to other people. The concept of the "empathetic imagination" identifies a vital faculty that is included in our ability to read and comprehend language. It also provides a good conceptual backdrop for new approaches to teaching literature. I believe that imaginary stories are essential tools for the development of empathetic faculties. As Taner Can's experience confirms, the instructor's approach can make a huge difference to how students respond to story-worlds. My own experience has shown that students have to be taught to talk about emotions, since most of them were brought up in an environment that systematically invalidated emotional experience. Of course, students also need to be taught what emotions are. But this can only really be done once they have learnt to explore what they are feeling when they are reading a story, or getting on with their own lives.

You state that most societies bring up their children in an environment of alexithymia (the inability to recognise and talk about emotional experience). That means dealing with literature is also a political act. Think about Schiller or Büchner who had to flee their home countries or Harriet Beecher Stowe – and on the other hand the Nazi’s Bücherverbrennung in 1933. Shakespeare used history or foreign countries (Italy, Romeo and Juliet) to bring conflicts and feelings on stage. Usually any true literature will be critical towards current circumstances within society.

Giving a workshop to young authors at Munich Literaturhaus in 2017 a stated according to new psychodynamic developments that there are three levels you may look at a person on psychodynamic ways: conflict, structure and trauma. With conflicts you should differentiate between interpersonal conflicts (such as wanting to be cared for, or being unable to separate from others) and interpersonal conflicts (which might have to with your elders and society). The model doesn’t include (substance) dependency which could be a fourth important clue to understand human behaviour. So talking about emotions in fictional persons has to do with conflicts and structural deficits such as reading feelings and knowing about motivations.

Bringing up children in an alexithymic environment might have to with political and religious underpinnings. We might ask whether there any “true literature” dealing with deep conflicts from either strongly adhering Roman Catholics or Muslims? German Romantik was an answer to political repression and mainly formed by the Lutheran part of Germany. Astrid Lindgren’s children stories stem from a society where there was never slavery or serfdom in history, as in any other European country – to my opinion this might be one reason why she can tell differently about children’s feelings and their relationship to elders.

I believe that teaching literature and emotion in the classroom will depend in the society and country the classroom is located – and how deep you are allowed to go into especially interpersonal conflicts and discussing tradition. Societies who tend to be alexithymic are probably repressive towards personal freedom and opinions and as well tend to put more emphasis on tradition than on growth of every individual. So there will be – unfortunately – limitations to what you aim at.

All discourse are informed by ideology, which means that they are political. Already 1970s feminism emphasised that the personal is political. If we agree with the empirically verified conclusion by Lisa Feldman Barrett (and others), that emotions are meaning, it is moreover a matter of course that the reasons why people experience emotions are politically motivated. In principle, I agree with you, @Ulrich.

However, it is possible to identify emotions without going into an in-depth analysis of why people feel as they do. This is a particularly valuable strategy in a cross-cultural environment that is fraught with tensions. I have been inspired by Douglas E. Noll’s practical work in order to develop a critical practice that recognises the emotions of historically real and fictional characters who come from different cultural backgrounds, while refraining from judging the reasons that motivate these emotions.

It is a healthy exercise to sidestep political questions and instead concentrate on more mundane questions like: how does Ophelia feel when her father calls her a “green girl”? Having taught at FU Berlin and the University of Vienna in the past, I have observed that such seemingly trivial questions equip students with the skill to recognise another person as a human being. My European students loved the debates about the ways in which literature teaches its readers to come to terms with emotional experience as much as my students in Oman.

Furthermore, the skill of identifying and talking about emotions enables students to gain healthy self-confidence. They learn to communicate with and respect people from different cultural backgrounds. The same does not necessarily happen if you “simply” teach critical analysis. I have heard European MA students who’d studied psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory express shockingly racist statements.

It is interesting that the discussion has veered into an attempt to explain what emotional intelligence is. This means that the focus has shifted to an attempt to rationalize the premises for teaching emotional intelligence. This is an important question. But I would like to return to my basic question: HOW CAN WE TEACH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

When I teach literature courses (currently in the Middle East), I devote a lot of effort to developing my students' emotional intelligence. I have developed a quite extensive list of questions and tasks that are aimed towards improving my students' ability to understand and apply the skills that are embraced by "emotional intelligence". I am deeply interested to hear what my colleagues are doing.

The narrative and dramatic quality of literature makes it potentially a suitable source for understanding and interpreting of the emotions displayed by major and minor characters. You van teach emotional intelligence through literature by dividing the class into various discussion groups asking them questions about the does and donts of the causes underlying characters' motives, actions, and so on.

Literature is an excellent medium for teaching emotional intelligence. As Tim Gillespie's essay "Why Literature Matters" (recommend by Taner Can) explains so well, the simple process of reading develops the empathy and the imagination of readers. In the literature classroom, it's possible to go a step further and to practice identifying and spelling out how characters and narrators feel, and by doing so improve the students emotional granularity. My students really enjoy the task of recognizing and describing how a text creates the tapestry of emotional resonances.

Detailed attention to the emotions that are engendered by the words of a particular passage, then, goes beyond basic empathy. Students learn to listen deeply to what is going on in the mind of a character or narrator. This develops people skills and leadership skills which are eminently important for humanities graduates who want to succeed in the current job market. The value of these skills has also been recognized in organization studies.

Covid has overturned the foundations of education. Universities worldwide are reconsidering what we teach and how we teach (in the dual sense of contrasting online teaching to real-life classes, on the one hand, and re-thinking pedagogical methodologies, on the other). In my experience, the discussion of fictional stories is an ideal medium to help students engage with their worries about the future.

Does anyone else have any thoughts?